Baddiel reveals good, bad and ugly of family

Camera IconDavid Baddiel in My Family: Not the Sitcom.Picture: Supplied

Families have always provided fertile ground for comedians to sow their satirical seeds, especially when working within the sitcom, sketch or observational comedy genres. Many comedians also address serious issues such as loss, addiction, depression or life-threatening illness.

Few, however, so successfully combine most in the same show as UK novelist, screenwriter and comedian David Baddiel.

Celebrity endorsements give some idea of the flavour of Baddiel’s My Family: Not the Sitcom. Bill Bailey calls it “deeply personal, hilarious and touching in equal measure”, while J.K. Rowling found it “brilliant, funny (and) emotional”.

Now Perth audiences will have the chance to make up their own minds when Baddiel brings his Olivier- nominated West End hit to the Octagon Theatre next month.

Billed as “a show about memory, ageing, infidelity, dysfunctional relatives, moral policing on social media, golf, and gay cats ... a massively disrespectful celebration of the lives of David Baddiel’s late sex- mad mother, Sarah, and dementia- ridden father, Colin”, My Family: Not the Sitcom follows on from Baddiel’s previous show FAME: Not the Musical.

The co-creator of Fantasy Football League and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and author of a number of bestselling adult and children’s books, Baddiel says he doesn’t do reverence.

“Reverence does people a great disservice,” he says. “My 84-year-old dad has dementia. When people get dementia, you usually start treating them with kid gloves or whatever. But he’s got this sweary, obscenity-laden form — which, by the way, is just an extension of what he was always like.”

So, he says, why not embrace that rather than be “sad and shame-faced” about it? “You have this hilarious bull-in-a-china-shop type of existence, where he’s basically swearing at rabbis and approaching women and it’s f...... mental.”

In other words, honesty is a form of respect. You’re being faithful to that person’s memory. Take Baddiel’s approach to his late mother.

“I was at her funeral and all these people were telling me how wonderful she was,” he says. “And I thought ‘Well, you didn’t really know her. You’re just saying that’.”

He says this form of reverence for the deceased “erases people out of existence for a second time”. It says nothing about who they really were.

“So I ended up writing this show,” he says, “which is storytelling, but which tells the absolute truth about my mother and father.”

One such story relates to his mother’s passion for golf, which just happened to be related to a passion for something else.

“She had a very public affair that she was very proud of, with a golfing memorabilia salesman,” he says. “It led to her becoming obsessed with golf. The house was a shrine to golf.”

The result of acknowledging such stories, and indeed celebrating them, is a specificity that brings loved ones “back to life”, as Baddiel has it. “Because it’s just so absurd and real and true,” he says.

“My brother was quite uncertain about the show, for example. But when he saw it, he loved it. He said it felt like our mother was in the room. And that’s what happens if you talk realistically about someone — not just saying they’re wonderful.”

My Family: Not the Sitcom is on at the Octagon Theatre on September 17. Book at ticketsWA.com.